Twenty years in search, spent on the parts that were about to change

From 2006 rankings to 2026 recommendations

I started doing search in 2006, when the job was mostly links and on-page copy, and the results page was ten blue links and nothing else. Since then I've run campaigns for corporate accounts, local service businesses and international clients, across dozens of markets and categories.

For ten consecutive years I ranked as a top affiliate for Buffalo Partners, one of the UK's leading gaming operators. Gaming affiliate search is about as hard as the discipline gets: enormous budgets, sophisticated competitors, volatile algorithms and no tolerance for work that doesn't produce. Holding position there for a decade tests something most search careers never do, which is what actually survives when the ground keeps moving.

And it has moved. Search has been rebuilt several times across those two decades: the quality updates that killed thin content, the shift to mobile-first, the slow rise of the zero-click results page. Each time, the people who did well were the ones who saw the change coming and rebuilt their approach before they were forced to.

AI assistants are the largest rebuild yet. When ChatGPT and AI Overviews started answering the questions my clients' customers used to type into Google, I moved early: upgrading live client retainers for AI visibility, learning what actually shifts the needle on real revenue, and keeping only what worked. This isn't a service page bolted onto an SEO business. It's where two decades of search experience currently points.

How I work

• Both engines, one strategy. SEO pays today and AI visibility decides tomorrow. They get built together, or you pay for the same work twice.
• Depth compounds. Twenty years of watching search rewrite itself is the reason I recognised this shift early, and the reason I can tell a real change from noise.
• Focused beats bloated. Fewer deliverables, chosen by impact. If work doesn't move visibility or revenue, it doesn't make the plan.
• You work with me directly. The person setting your strategy is the person tracking model updates and citation patterns daily.
• Proof beats promises. Long-term retainers are the whole business. Clients stay because the work compounds.